Intrapersonal Communication is defined as the communication
process within an individual. The way that society communicates
in our complex daily lives may only be understood after we are
able to comprehend that communication utterly relies on our
particular perceptions.

We will now take the time to introduce how the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis is related to language and thought in communication.
We will also explain how it is possible for psychology to play
such a major and essential part of intrapersonal communication.

Language and Thought

Akram

The study of language and culture is known as
sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is a broad term covering any
study of language that makes significant use of social data, or
conversely any study of social life that makes use of linguistic
data.

In his writing about the principle of linguistic relatively,
which states at least as a hypothesis that structures the human
being language influences the manner in which he understood
reality and believed with respect to it. Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote
in 1936 in "a linguistic consideration of thinking in
primitive communities" that linguistic is essentially the
quest for meaning. The real concern of linguistics, he writes, "is to light up the
thick darkness of the language and there by up much of the
thought, the culture and the outlook upon life of a given
community with the light of this .golden something" as I
have heard it called, this transmitting principle of meaning. He
was concerned more with the substance than with process, He was
more interested in what in some abstract sense was being thought
about than with the mental processes by which one might think,
and this outlook led him to linguistics, full of
"comment" rather than to psychology relatively
"content less" in its concern with generalized
stimuli-response mechanisms.

Whorf appears to believe, indeed, that the content of thought
influences the process of thought or that differing content
produces differing species of process, so that generalization
about process becomes impossible without content being taken into
account. He believes different in thought content and their
corresponding effects on thought processes and behavior in
general would be spectacularly revealed by comparison of
different language structures.

The idea of linguistic relativity
did not emerge in a full-fledged form until after Whorf had
started studying with Sapir. Not until he began to analyze
"Hopi", a language with a grammar much more complex and
subtle than that of "Aztec" or even that of
"Nlaya!', did he begin to appreciate that the nation of
linguistic relatively could be developed not only in much more
telling and effective way by noticing differences in
"lactation", but also in grammatical structure.

In his research "Whorf" discovered that fundamental
syntactic differences are present among language groups. The
Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity simply states that
the structure of a culture in language determines the behavior
and habits of thinking in that culture.

In the words of Sapir, human beings do not live in the
objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity
as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expression for
their society. The fact of the matter is, that the "real
world" is to a large extent unconscientiously built-up on
the language habits of the group we see and hear and otherwise
experienced very largely as we do, because the language habits of
our community predispose certain choices of interpretation
(Littlejohn 196).

This hypothesis suggests that our thought processes and the
way we see the world, are shaped by the grammatical structure of
the language. Whorf spent much of his life investigating the
relationship of language and behavior. His work with the Hopi
illustrates the relativity hypothesis, Like all culture groups,
the Hopi possess a reality, which represents their view of the
world at large.

One area of Whorf is extensive analysis of Hopi thought is the
analysis of time. Where many cultures refer to points in time
(such as season), as nouns, the Hopi conceive of time as a
passage or process. Thus, Hopi language never objects time.

In our culture, three senses indicate location or place in a
partial analogy; past, present and future.

In the standard European language SAE including English, we
visualize time as a line. The Hopi conception is more complex.
Suppose a speaker reports that "a man is running." The
Hopi would seethe use of the word Wari, which is a
statement of running as a fact. The same word would be used for a
report.

As a result of these linguistic differences, Hopi and SAE
culture will think about perceive and behave toward time
differently. The Hopi tend to engage in lengthy preparing
activities, Experiences (getting prepared) tend to aculeate as
time "gets later."

In the SEA cultures, with their partial treatment of time,
experiences are not accumulated in the same sense. The custom in
SAE cultures is to record events such that what happened in the
past is objective.

Whorf summarizes this view "concepts of time and
"matter" are not given in substantially the same form
by experience to all men, but depend upon the nature of the
language or languages through the use of which they have been
developed.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (LI96) Revisited

Amie

An overall assumption of Sapir and Whorf is that, we are
conditioned in our culture to be one way. This happens on many
levels mostly at the came and effect level.

The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is otherwise known as the theory of
linguistic relativity. Edward Sapir worked with his protege
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Whorf was best known for his work in the
field of linguistics. To understand and follow the work done by
these two theorists one must first be clear of the meanings of
both linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity.

Linguistic determinism is a theory that holds that
language determines what we do, what we say and what we think ...
in fact it also limits what we do, think and say.

Linguistic relativity is a theory that the language we
speak influences what we perceive and think. Since different
languages catalog the world differently, speakers of different
languages will see the world differently,

The Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity states that
the structure of a cultures language determines the habits,
behaviors and ways of thinking within that culture. We are shaped
by grammatical structure of the language in which we are a part
of In the words of Edward Sapir,

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone,
nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily
understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of
expression for the society. It is quite an illusion to
imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without
the use of language and that language is merely an
incidental means of solving specific problems of
communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is
that the "real world" is to a large extent
unconsciously built up on the language habits of the
group ... We see and hear

the otherwise experience very
largely as we do because the language habits of our
community predispose certain choices of interpretation
(Whorf 134).

Whorf spent much of his life investigating and analyzing the
relationship of language and behavior. He discovered that
fundamental syntactic differences are present among language
groups. He is well known for the studies which he conducted with
an Indian tribe in Arizona whom speak the Hopi dialect. Well
known as the Hopi's. One area of the extensive Hopi analysis is
the presence of time. The Hopi tribe conceives time as passages
or processes and the language never objectifies time at all. In
our culture we have three tenses of time that are indicated by
locations or places in spatial analogy; past, present and future.
Hopi verbs have no tense at all. In the same sense their verbs
relate to duration and order. (Model la)

In SAE , Standard Average European Language, in the English
language, we visualize time as a linear process, whereas the Hopi
see time as a more complex concept. As a result of these
linguistic differences, Hopi and SAE cultures think and perceive
time differently.

The effect that society has on language, and also the effect
that the environment has on language can be seen in a number of
ways. In the thoughts and words of B. L. Whorf , "Every
language is a vast pattern system, different from others, in
which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which
the personality not only communicates, but analyzes nature,
notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels
it's reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness (Whorf,
252).

There is many examples of physical environment and how
it effects society as well as how it reflects language. In
English for example there is only one word for snow, yet in the
language of the Eskimos they have a massive number of words for
snow, for obvious reasons due to their environment. In our
language we can differentiate the word snow by using different
distinctions such as fine snow, dry snow, powdered snow, but the
Eskimos language is lexicalized or made by means of individual
words. Other languages follow the same patterns depending on
their physical environments. Such as the Northern Scandinavian
language has many words for reindeer, and the Bedouin Arabic
language has several lexical words to describe camels and horses
in their vocabulary, This is because these objects are very
important to the cultures.

Sapir-Whorf's theory also looks at the social environment and
how it reflects language and the structure of language. For
example a societies relationship with the kinship system is
generally reflected in it's kinship vocabulary (Rossi-Landi, 27).
In English speaking societies important kin relationships am
those signaled by single vocabulary words, i.e. mother, father,
sister, brother aunt, uncle etc. However, in other communities
the kin vocabulary differs. In the Australian aboriginal language
of Njarnal

the term mama signifies a single kinship relationship directly
related to the father. For example mama refers to father's
sister, father's brother, father's sister's husband. The word
deciphers the use of the relationship with the male and the same
is used with the word karna for the relationship with the
females. This is proof that languages and communities have many
differences on the social level. Language determines the
structure of our behaviors and also the availability of words in
a language will determine the sort of cognitive and cultural
classifications which a person might make,

The Whorfian theory goes beyond philosophical claims to make
theoretical generalizations about how language operates in
cultural experience. Joshua Fishman writes about the extreme
nature of Whorf and Sapir's claims by saying, "the theory
promotes two horrors, the horror of hopelessness, that people are
trapped by their language, and the horror of helplessness, that
there is no hope for the communication across cultures (Fishman,
323).

Gestalt Psychology

Alma

Gestalt Psychology includes the theory of perception. It is
best explained in stating that we process information and what we
see in the easiest form for us to understand based on our world.
Gestalt Psychology is able to explain why there are so many
variations on the way we perceive things, We often try too hard
to make things make sense. We want to understand why things are
as they arc and so we take with us the prior knowledge and
experiences in our lives in order to form attitudes and

assumptions about things. We are able to do this based on the
three laws presented by Kohler, 1947. They are as follows:

1) Principle of closure: this is when we see a figure that is
disconnected or incomplete and we fill in the gaps - sensory
organization (figure 1): this is when we see things in a pattern
although they are not really in any particular pattern

- organized entities (figure2): this is when we
see look at something and see something other
than what we thought because someone tells us it
is there

2) Law of proximity: this is when we see things that are near
each other as being with each other -stimulus situation (figure
3): this is the tendency to form pairs of things because of the
way they are visualized

3) Law of similarity: this is when we perceive something
because we know that it is there -perceptional set (figure 4):
this is when we look at something and we are able to see
something other than what we first saw simply because someone
told us that there was something else there.

Katz of the University of Stockholm wrote a book entitled Gestalt
Psychology: Its Nature and Significance in which he explored
three additional ways that we may perceive many situations, They
are the following:

I ) Law of closed forms (figure 5): this is the tendency
to view things that enclose something else as being a
part of that particular unit

2) Law of common movement:
this is when we group elements together simply because
they move similarly and simultaneously.

3) Law of experience: this is the way we comprehend
symbols in communicating

- individual experience (figure 6): our
individual experiences are based on the
circumstances in which a particular situation is
presented to us and that is why we are able to
perceive things differently from one another.

I hope that I have been clear in showing that our social
intercourse, social arrangement, and knowledge are reasons why we
must always be clear when communicating. We are able to randomly
make assumptions about things because we are trying to keep
everything sensible and simple in our world. We want to
understand and so we try to make sense of everything we
encounter, thus, many symbols in human communication are
accidental.

Gestalt Psychology

Charlie

At every moment in our life, we are being bombarded with
hundreds of different sensations. These sensations are caused by
different stimuli. The way we process the stimuli is called
perception. Perception as Butter reported is "a mental
process in which we select, organize, and interpret the many
stimuli that impinge upon us at any given moment."(p. 39).
Gestalt psychology is the study of perception.

As we are walking down the street, many of us might be
thinking about a homework project coming up in the near future.
At that moment, a breeze may blow pass you at the same time as
you notice a man hanging his laundry. All of these things that
you just noticed are examples of stimuli. What you feel and think
about the stimuli is called sensation. What you label the
sensation would be perception. The sensation felt when you
thought about the homework assignment coming up might be that
your stomach was turning. Weather you thought that the feeling
was uneasiness about the assignment or hunger, would be the
perception. What this means is that all of the different things
that we notice in a given time or place, we process in different
ways depending on our background, or past experiences. For
example, one person may look at a photograph of a beach and enjoy
it because of the way the sun looked in the background, whereas
another may look at how many people were at the beach in the
picture and dislike it. All of these different interpretations of
the different sensations caused by the stimuli are examples of
perception.

There is a big difference between sensation and perception.
The main difference between the two is that a sensation is what
turns into a perception. For example, if someone felt an
uncomfortable feeling in their arm, they could perceive this to
be pain. The reason that they would perceive this sensation to be
pain is because of past experiences where they felt the same
sensation, and someone had labeled it as pain. The sensation part
is only the physical reception of the stimuli. The perception
part is what you actually perceive this sensation to be.
According to Mc Davod, we learn to perceive as a result from our
past experiences with many different people, places, and events.
Perception is the way you choose to interpret the different
sensations that you feel.

There are many different principles of perception suggested by
Gestalt Psychology. Some are the principle of proximity, the
principle of good form, the search for order, and the principal
of similarity.

The principle of proximity deals with how we perceive
things which are located, or grouped together. For example, if
you were walking down the street, and noticed a man and a woman
walking down the other side of the street, you might perceive
them to be a couple. Another example would be if the two people
looked similar, you might perceive them to be relatives.

The principal of good form is one in which you see
something going in one direction or a certain way, you
perceive it to be that way. For example, if you saw a set
of numbers, say 2,4,6,8, you might perceive this to be a
set of numbers increasing by two, when in actuality it is
a list of the different numbers of CDs I own by
four different bands. Good form is filling in the blanks.
You might perceive that the next number will be 10, when
in actuality it is 13.

Another principal closely related to the previous is the
theory of the search for order. An example of this would
be when you look up at the clouds and see shapes. Because
of the search for order, you percieve the clouds to be
different shapes and objects.

The law of similarity basically states that similar
images or objects appear to be grouped together. An
example of this would be if you were looking at a picture
of two different shapes. Because of this principal, you
would perceive each of the different shapes to be grouped
together.

XOXOXOXO

XOXOXOXO

XOXOXOXO

XOXOXOXO

In this picture, you would probably perceive the xs and
os to be grouped together.

With Gestalt theory, it ties directly into intra personal
communication, because it deals with how you perceive things. How
you perceive things will make a difference in the way you
communicate with yourself. It is easy to perceive things in
certain ways, only because you arent looking close enough
at a sensation, but instead rushing to a conclusion and
perceiving something the way it wasnt meant to be perceived
at all.

Figure- Ground

Stephanie Wise

Gestalt psychologists like David Katz have concentrated on
form concepts in there studies psychology. In his book entitled, Gestalt
psychology Its nature and significance, in particular he
found a concept of Figure- ground. Figure-ground deals with
perception in humans. How humans are able to process what they see
and what strategies reused.

In figure-ground pictures it is impossible to see the particular
picture because of the background figures. Often you can not tell
what part of the drawing is actually the back-ground or center of
the picture because of the complexity of the picture itself

An example would be Figure 7, it is impossible to see upright
cross against a background of circles or a different cross
against a background of diagonals. Another ambiguous drawing is
shown in Figure 8. In the drawing there are TOWS of black
letters. The letters shown is a letter "T" With a white
background or a repeat white motif with a black
background.

In looking at drawings in Figure- ground what is important to
focus on is the colors in the drawing. Most often there are at
least to colors, one is a dominate color. For example black and
the other color would be, for example white. Looking at
the colors black and white, black is most often the background
color. Most people would link this with the fact that in the
evening it is dark and that would be the background color.

The Figure- ground is of fundamental importance for psychology
theory. There are all kinds of models made to be demonstrated as
a Figure-ground model. I have only touched on a couple of
drawings but there are other things you can use like for
instance sound. However sound is much easier to differentiate
what is background and what is not.

Conclusion

In conclusion, intrapersonal communication is the foundation
for all communication. It begins with language and thought
itself, but includes our perception of what language and thought
are. Every individual may see something and assume a particular
attitude toward the subject, however, one can be certain that
each assumption made is distinctly different. Intrapersonal
Communication is a challenge because we have so many variations
that arise from our perceptions at particular moments.